Starbucks, Tim Hortons, Dunkin, etc.

Like, why? Life is too short.

See also: Anheuser-Busch products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

Say what you will but he has factors in his favor: weight class, doughiness, and (absorbent) padding around the groin to prevent cheap shots.

There are no higher order thinking processes running in that brain either, just pure animalistic id. A concussion-inducing blow doesn’t make any difference if those brain cells were already dead.

There’s actually an interesting medical-history backstory to it.

The Way Out is basically a cribbed version of Dr. John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, written in the early 90s IIRC. John Sarno was a bonafide practicing MD, but at the time he was writing, the basic notion of a mind body connection was still highly controversial. I.e., the premise that psychological stress could manifest in physical ways (like tight shoulders) wasn’t taken as a given.

Anyway, Sarno was well ahead of the curve, and while he had some good epidemiological and histological arguments, he was labeled a quack by the mainstream establishment. He had a chip on his shoulder over this, and as a result, his book has a notable new-age/anti-establishment/counterculture bend to it. Didn’t help that he overstated his case in some egregious ways (like speculatively tying TMS-related ischemia to neoplasm), even if most of it was well-argued and backed by solid clinical assertions.

Despite criticism from the old-school, the book was a marketing success, and in the ~35 years since publishing, the medical establishment has pulled a major about-face, and a big majority of PTs/orthos/related specialists now endorse the core ideas of his work.

Because Sarno actually cared about publicizing his ideas to a mass audience, the best option he had was the traditional PR route on talk shows like Oprah/Dr. Phil. NEEDLESS TO SAY: Oprah and Dr. Phil are not reliable sources of medical information, and have platformed absolute cranks, but this is a case where the a broken clock happened to be right and give an audience to someone wrongly spurned for being ahead of their time.

Same trend has carried down to the present day, but in a nutshell, that’s the reason why that book has that particular endorsement, even though it probably shouldn’t.

You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.

I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.

Not really.

It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.

From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.

As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.

Not that I disagree with the post… but the general public out here wilding about vaccines and tylenol and fluoride and shit yet missing this extra-stupid medical “conspiracy” will never not be funny to me.

The FDA doesn’t like greenlighting drugs of dubious direct clinical benefit with high abuse potential, so for the sake of expediency, Pfizer decided to push the narrative that Viagra definitely wasn’t fun unless you had peepee problems. No one wants to look like they have peepee problems, so not enough people who’ve tried it are willing to call a spade a spade and say it’s fun af regardless of age or necessity.

Thus the narrative persists.

I’m forever all-in on my blue-eyed prince

Slober, undesirable pungent odors, clumsy misdirected energy, excitability — all balanced by a heavy dose of dumb affection and naivety.

QED

You’re supposed to boof that.

Where on earth are you getting this from?

Galton was a eugenicist who thought intelligence was baked into one’s bloodline, Spearman’s entire career was that the g-factor was a relatively immutable cross-domain constant, Binet was measuring skulls phrenology style, etc.

Y’all sleeping on black soldier flies.

They’re copycats that look like mud daubbers, but have no ability to sting or bite. They don’t readily transmit human diseases, and they compete with noxious species like house flies and roaches. Present in most places across the globe.

Their larvae are the most-efficient known converts of input biomass to output protein, they can compost most household foods quite easily, and they’re an excellent animal feed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetia_illucens

You’re totally on the money with your core thesis about epidemiological studies here, and I agree processed meats as a standalone variable are likely a massively overplayed factor in CRC research.

When it comes to the more general claims in the GP comment though, re: processed food and low fiber, there are literally hundreds of independent studies at different levels all pointing in similar directions. It’s pretty incontrovertible at this point.

See any recent review on CRC etiology for reference, e.g.: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elroy-Weledji/publication/377724506_Clinics_in_Oncology_The_Etiology_and_Pathogenesis_of_Colorectal_Cancer_OPEN_ACCESS/links/65b3f83e79007454973be66e/Clinics-in-Oncology-The-Etiology-and-Pathogenesis-of-Colorectal-Cancer-OPEN-ACCESS.pdf

Just adding my two cents as a happy user of several years: I vastly prefer its results to ddg/google, I kinda forgot the AI stuff existed since I turned it off and it’s stayed off, and I never hit the quota when I was on the limited plan.

The real killer feature is the ability to downrank or block spammy sites IME (pinterest, fandom, etc.).

Attainder.

It’s just off-the-cuff writing without copyediting. Tad sloppy, but weird hate, homie.

E: To squarely address my view of Teddy K, he’s in the same bucket as Karl Marx, Otto Von Bismarck, Rasputin, etc. Not someone whose core values I share, or think is a good person — but a historically interesting character who has cultural symbolic importance for the role they played in their respective time and place.

Just gonna rip from Wikipedia

With its initial publication in 1995, the manifesto was received as intellectually deep and sane. Writers described the manifesto’s sentiment as familiar. To Kirkpatrick Sale, the Unabomber was “a rational man” with reasonable beliefs about technology. He recommended the manifesto’s opening sentence for the forefront of American politics. Cynthia Ozick likened the work to an American Raskolnikov (of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), as a “philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose … driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism”.

Industrialized Society and Its Future (name of the manifesto)

Might be a matter of taste, but ISAIF is worth a read on the basis of its wild mix of sociological brilliance and unhingedness IMO. That’s not to say I endorse blowing people up in the slightest, but the work stands taller than the sum of its influences.

E.g. I think he synthesized and added to quite a few different authors in presenting his concept of oversocialization. (Please do correct me if I’m off-base — I love philosophy but it’s not my main wheelhouse).